'Amy' was a joyful little girl before she was killed by her mother. Photo: Supplied

The researchers, from the Monash University Filicide Project, noted an "undue proportion of deaths" in the outer Melbourne municipality of Wyndham, according to their submission to the Victorian Royal Commission on Family Violence.

Wydnham includes the suburbs of Hoppers Crossing, Werribee, Point Cook, Wyndham Vale and Truganina.

Monash researchers, who are completing the national survey in partnership with the Australian Institute of Criminology, thought perhaps Wyndham's high death rate was related to a relative lack of available health and welfare services. While there had been "strong suburban development in the area, [it] had not been matched by the provision of services", Monash Filicide Project co-director Thea Brown says.

Wyndham may also help explain why Australia – where an estimated 25 children a year die at the hands of their parents – has a relatively high filicide rate compared to similar nations like England, a fact that Brown finds "alarming".

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"It may be, because we're a country with a lot of migration and rapidly growing urban areas, that we're more prone to have suburban areas without many services," she says.

Still, the story is not as simple as services preventing deaths. An earlier Filicide Project survey of 57 Victorian filicides committed between 2000 and 2009, found most perpetrators had been in contact with health, welfare or justice services in the year leading up to the murder, though the type of service differed depending on whether the perpetrator was a mother, father or stepfather.

Brothers Jai , 9, Bailey, 2, and Tyler Farquharson, 7, died when the car driven by their father was driven into a dam. Photo: Supplied

Indeed, in a 2014 paper for Child Abuse Review, the authors noted that even when health services assessed a patient as having suicidal or homicidal ideas, these assessments "were made without further follow-up of children's safety".

Brown hopes the national study on filicide will mean these deaths are no longer seen just as random tragedies, but studied, and hopefully, prevented.

The death of Darcey Iris Freeman at the hands of her father shocked the country.

In its submission to the Victorian royal commission, the Filicide Project calls for a public health approach to filicide. It wants screening to identify children at risk and safety plans for those children, as well as programs to educate GPs, mental health professionals and other workers in criminal justice and welfare, to help them better recognise risk factors for filicide.

"What our studies have shown so far [is] that there are a number of risk factors and it's not one or another, it's a constellation," Brown says. The risk factors also differ for mothers, fathers and stepfathers.

Matthew Fitchett (aged 9) and his brother Thomas Fitchett (aged 11) were killed by their mother.

"Mental health is a major factor in that it is the one most frequently found to be present. But in the case of mothers it's often, though not always, accompanied by parental separation and then, after that, domestic violence."

Mental illness is also more common among mothers than fathers or stepfathers (for whom it is a lot less common). The survey of Victorian filicides found only one of the mothers who killed was not suffering from a mental illness.

Carolyn Harris Johnson, who has studied men who've committed filicide after separating from their partners, says a public health campaign is "not a bad idea in terms of increasing public awareness about the constellation of factors that precede [a killing]. Because very often what you find afterwards is that there were signs [filicide] was a possibility, but people weren't in tune enough with the risk factors to report them or take appropriate action."